My first idea relies on the text (or at least Cliffs' Notes' summary) of part of an actual Shakespeare play--there's a central element of riffing on the source material in a play-within-the-game way. Obviously, including even a single act of a play would be *way* too many words. Heck, there might not even be room for an entire scene. On the other hand, it's not any particular play (and, strictly speaking, should work fine even if it's not Shakespeare), his works are easily and freely available online, and i don't think you'll need to go out and do any reading to understand/judge the game. If I were actually publishing this as a commercial game, I might include summary versions of a couple acts, but I might not. Does that seem like a kosher omission from my Game Chef text?

(And if the answer is "maybe", I'll just do it, and if it gets DQed as "incomplete", oh well.)

Not an official call, but I don't have include a deck of playing cards even if my game calls for one. And, the plays are all in the public domain. I'd include them as a playing component (and have one or two as supplemental material) and focus on the rules of the game itself.--TAZ

Woodelf: Yeah, you can just say in the beginning that "you need a copy of Two Noble Kinsmen (or whatever) to play this game," just like other people might require dice or cards or letter openers or whatever. No need to include the whole text. If you need to reference specific passages, just use the standard (V.iii.234-237) notation (Act.scene.lines).

So, because I was an idiot, I managed to leave all my files at home while I was on vacation from Friday AM until 11pm tonight- so I wasn't able to submit what I worked on. SUCK! Eventually I'll post it somewhere though, cause I was pretty proud of it.

Hey, Jonathan. I tried to send in my vote, but it just sent me to a page that asked me if I was sure I wanted to, but didn't give me any options to say yes or no. I thought it might result in a doubled vote if I tried reloading the page, so I figured I'd check with you first.

The recommendations aren't automated at all! It just sends an email note to me and I'm manually counting them. So send as many as it's necessary until it works. If you still have issues, just send your recommendation to me as a private message here on the Forge.

So... we have a few fill-in reviewers going to work on the reviews and recommendations of the three folks who didn't submit anything. Those will hopefully be done by Wednesday or so. In the meantime, my father and I are going ahead and reading the games that already have 3-4 recommendations.

There are currently 6 definite finalists (two games with 4 recommendations and four games with 3) and an additional 10 "runner-up" games that got 2 recommendations, some of which could still be bumped up to finalists, depending on which ones the fill-in reviewers recommend. Of the remaining 50 games, 22 of them have at least one recommendation, meaning that, if the fill-in judges recommend 3 different games, a full 50% of the games submitted were someone's favorite game. That's terrific!

Once the fill-in reviewers are done and every game has had a equal chance to be recommended, I plan to announce both the 3-4 recommendations finalists and the "runner-up" 2 recommendation games.

The ultimate winners will be announced at GenCon, possibly just before the Indie RPG Awards, but I'm currently trying to work that out with John Kim.